School Schmool.

Nothing like school to bring me back into the reality of things. haha :) We started school on Monday and so far it hasn't been too bad! Especially since we only have classes Monday-Thursday so that we can spend more time traveling on the weekends! One of the things I love most about Gonzaga is that the classes are fairly small, but nothing compared to the sizes here! The smallest class I have is my Renaissance Europe History class with about 8 students and my largest is probably my art history class, Florence of the Medici, with about 30. There are only about 120 students here this semester and although the majority are from Gonzaga, there are quite a lot from other Jesuit universities like Loyola Marymount (LMU) and Santa Clara, and even students that came by themselves from other schools in the US.

So this semester, the classes that I'm taking are:
- Renaissance Europe History
- Philosophy of Art
- Italian 102
- Art History: Florence of the Medici
- Religion: Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Faith in a World Come of Age

So by now I've had all these classes at least once. And somehow each of these (besides Italian) are pretty much history classes... and I'm not that enthusiastic about history, but I guess now I'll know so much about Florence and Italy that people will think I've lived here my whole life! In my art history class actually, we have lectures on Mondays and Tuesdays and then go on tours Wednesdays to see the museums, paintings or places that we talked about in the lectures. Today was the first tour we went on and although it was at 8:30am, it was actually really cool to have our teacher as our personal tour guide and visit the places for free. Well, we're already paying for tuition, but still, it's a pretty sweet deal to have it paid for by the school. Today we went to the Duomo which is the main cathedral in Florence, the Santa Croce which is a Franciscan church where Michelangelo and Galileo were buried, and Santa Maria Maddalene De'Pazzi which was a Benedictine convent dedicated to Mary Magdalen. So hopefully by the end of the semester I'll have visited all the major sights of Florence!

On a side note, one thing that I'm gonna have to get used to is doing my homework early. Not that I always procrastinate... but since a lot of weekends I'll be off traveling through Europe I'm going to need to plan things out more wisely since weekends will no longer be able to be saved for homework :(

And speaking of homework, I have a lot of Italian to review since I haven't taken it in a whole year! Oh well, it'll click back right? Hopefully... Ciao! :)